Thanks all for the many helpful suggestions. I, too, find car rides a good time to talk - not to mention having a captive audience helps also.
We actually had a funny episode along this line when he was in 5th grade. A sub caught some boys trying to visit adult sites during computer time. (Bright idea - all the computers line the walls facing OUT, with a teacher monitoring access.) My son wasn't one of the key parties, but I imagine he was aware - I think ALL the boys in the room were.
When I spoke to the principal (a friend), she told me what had happened and that she was pretty sure the kids didn't see anything because of the filter, but she'd called the tech department to check. (And she had called the boys into her office and talked about appropriate computer activity.)
I helped her pull the browser history on the machine and we saw the addresses the boy had tried. (And the filter did block adult material, so no one saw anything inappropriate.) But it was a really odd pattern. They tried a couple adult sites, then a site on sport fishing, then adult sites, then back to the fishing site. Fishing?? Why in the world were they going there in the middle of this exploration? But looking at the address, we figured it out.
They were typing something like
www.striper.com
. Turns out a "Striper" (one "P") is a type of bass. Must have been quite a disappointment after all the blocks to hit a site that didn't get stopped by the filter only to see pictures of
fish instead of
strippers!
The principal and I laughed our heads off, and I teased her that what really need attention was not the 5th grade porn problem, but the 5th grade
spelling problem!
